Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday July 14, 2011 @06:33PM
from the for-those-about-to-post-we-salute-you dept.

wiredmikey writes "The results of a recent survey released today by Men's Health Network found that shift workers, people who work non-traditional hours including IT professionals working overnight shifts, report that these shifts are negatively impacting their health, work, well-being, and quality of life. The survey revealed that the majority of shift workers (79%) believe that they are negatively impacted by their shift work and voiced daily concern over their energy level (47%), weight (43%), and their sex lives (30%). Additionally, the survey showed that the average shift worker hasn't had a meal with their family in two weeks or exercised in 24 days. The results of this survey really shouldn't be surprising. While the survey infers that shift workers may be overweight, the issue extends far beyond and into the general population of the United States, including children. Childhood obesity is at an all time high in America, so this issue isn't just related to the night shift."

When examining poultry chicks, "sexed" means you have determined if they are male or female, thus you can sell them at different prices. So when I hear that an IT night worker is "undersexed" it means that an expert was unable to determine which sex they are. That sounds pretty bad to me.

I had more sex and was way more skinnier when I did work the night shift.

Me too. I used to do 12 hour shifts, which worked out to 15 work days in a month as opposed to the usual 20. On the days when I was working, I'd have so little time to do anything that I got in the habit of just going to the gym for a couple hours and then hitting the sack, while my extra days-off left me plenty of time for women. I liked that far more than the ol' 9-5 grind.

The article doesn't appear to compare these statistics with non-shift workers in the same field. I'm sure that shift work has its own issues, but the gist of the article is that shift work also correlates to "voiced daily concerns" about fairly common maladies among office workers. How does the 43% who complain daily about their weight, for example, compare to non-shift workers?

It also solely references people's own perceptions - e.g. it doesn't check whether night shift workers actually are more often overweight than their colleagues in the day shift, just that they believe that to be the case. It would be more interesting to have actual weight data. Also there is the issue of causality - for example it's conceivable that someone who has fewer social contacts would be more likely to accept a job on the night shift.

Also skeptical because they reports don't distinguish between types of shift work. There is a huge difference between working "straight swing/night shift" (always on the same shift), "rotating shifts" where you never get a chance to settle in to a schedule because every couple weeks everyone is rotated to another shift, and even working random shifts like the air traffic controllers do where they are working all three shifts during the course of any week.

There was also that increased access to large quantities of food combined with the biological urge to eat as much as possible to store for times without food. Along with increased office jobs versus labor.

My problem, after a nutrition class and being pointed to the New American Plate, was that I was fed by my grandmother (still getting past some of the phobias she instilled that kept me inside all the time.) She only knew the big farm meals from her childhood. The meals that were meant to fill out the calor

There's also been a large change in quality of food. The majority of people won't recognize healthy, normal food if it bit them in the arse these days. All deep-fried, processed, additive laden shit, the additives being there to mask the abysmal quality and trigger 'tasty' and 'appetizing' responses in your brain, making you eat more than you initially wanted. And all you get is empty calories from sugar and trans fats. Despite food shows being all over the networks, cooking as a cultural technique seems to

Like so many things it's probably a feedback loop, not a simple causality. You might be a tad on the "chubby, antisocial people with the bad self-care issues" side to begin with, then when you have the job you become even more so - which makes you even more likely to take another job like it. Skill and experience is typically the most common one, as you get better at something you do it more because it's more fun being good than sucking, which gives you more experience which leads to higher skills which lea

For LESS money? Most people want to work an 8-5/M-F shift, so finding people willing to do nights/weekends is more of a challenge for companies. So often those shifts get a differential, so they're making MORE money than the daywalkers for the same job.

People need it, shift workers don't get very much of it. Just the bit most get in passing going to & from work helps allot. Without it, people are in general a bit more unhappy & lethargic.

When I worked 12 hour shifts, including nights, I got a lot more sun than I get now I do "9-5" in a windowless office, commuting on undeground rail. In the winter I'm underground before the sun rises, and leave after the sun sets.

He was talking about sunlight. As in: exposure of the skin to daylight, not necessarily sunbathing.

Your body needs sunlight to produce vitamin D. And you don't need much: just 20-30 minutes of exposing your face and arms to outdoor day conditions goes a long way, and that doesn't have to be direct sunlight though it helps a lot.

When I worked the Graveyard, I made sure that for my "lunch" I actually *left* the facility, often for a quick trip to the 24hr gym, and just as often went to a 24hr cafe. I made sure I had healthy snacks (I'm a serious snacker). I mean, you HAVE to take the initiative and think about how to create a healthy environment for yourself regardless of the time of day. In most cities, this is perfectly possible, you don't HAVE to spend your breaks sitting on your ass smoking and eating junk food.

That was my thought, back when I worked security, the night shift was the slimmest shift we had. With the day shift coming in second. The reason being that there was a ton of exercise involved with it, more than with either the day or swing shift.

My guess is that there's less food too. Cafeteria is closed, restaurants are closed, even many fast food joints are closed after ten or so. So you would tend to bring your own food. Or else use a vending machine but someone's going to get tired of stale twinkies and snickers for "lunch". Now if they put all the IT night shift worker in downtown Manhattan or San Francisco I'm sure they'd find something open, but not in the smaller cities or suburbs.

Denny's? Seriously, there is a Denny's in Bum Fuck Monroe, Washington. Most cities larger than 10,000 (and many of those as well) have all-night diners. And most cities have 24-hour big-name groceries such as (here on the West Coast) Safeway and Winco... They sell real food at these places as well as "ready made" real food... Really they do.

But really, what's to stop you from making a nice deli sandwich and a salad for your "brown bag" lunch? Nothing but apathy and laziness, in which case perhaps you were m

Just to add to this, go the whole way and make that vinaigrette yourself. Saves you a ton of additives that add nothing of value to the consumer, only enable the producer to make it more cheaply and give it a longer shelf-time. Adds perhaps 2 minutes to preparation time. Or, if you want that salad really quick - dash of good olive oil, squeeze of lime, pinch of salt. Mix it, done.

Security officers aren't typically allowed to leave the building for lunch. Which is why they typically brown bag it for meals on other shifts. Good luck getting a pizza delivered when you don't know if you're going to be free at a particular time to pay for it.

Night shifts working in the old "cold room" computer rooms was an awesome job as a university student. In a average twelve-hour shift, there was maybe six hours of work if you really stretched things and did a little extra. Yeah, there were the panicky emergency nights where you're literally running around fixing stuff, but on average there was six hours of time to fill waiting for jobs to finish, printouts to print, and error messages to not pop up. Nighttime TV sucks. Nighttime radio sucks. There wasn't always studying to do or a paper to write. And couldn't be out of the room for longer than a longish bathroom break length of time (5 minutes maybe) just in case a problem happened. That meant plenty of time to:

- Go for a walk up and down the stairs. Six flights! 14 stairs on each flight except between the 2nd and 3rd floor, where one flight had 13. Never worked that one out. Back to the room in under five minutes.

- Go down to the weight room, grab a couple dumbbells, bring them back up . Random dumbbell exercises in the room. Put them back in the weight room before the 5am fitness nutters come in.

- Sitting on an operating high speed line printer acts like one of those vibrate-the-weight-off machines. Okay, I never did that one, but female colleagues may have. Or my girlfriend. Allegedly.

Great job that I'm not sure even exists anymore. But I was the Buff Operator From Hell for those few years.

+1 here. I used to work the graveyard shift on a helpdesk for tax software, and it was the sweetest entry-level gig I ever had. Midnight until 8am. We got about 10% more money per hour for doing it, and it was way more relaxed than the day shift. Hardly anyone is doing their taxes at 4am. Management isn't there to make sure I'm wearing a tie, or that my feet aren't on the desk, or whatever bee is in their bonnet that day. Starting at midnight means that you can go out in the evening, have dinner with friend

I find nighttime TV (~11pm to ~6am) better than daytime TV (~7am to ~4pm) anymore. Cartoon Network's Adult Swim is decent much of the night, depending on how much you like their shows. Now there's Netflix and the like too.

Well I'm only the "swing" shift so maybe this doesn't apply to me (from 2pm to 11pm). I get home around 11:30pm. I have trained myself over the last year to be able to shower and go straight to bed when I get home (asleep by midnight). No TV or computer games. That way I have the next day to take a walk in the sun and go grocery shopping.
I also haven't bothered with any kind of cable TV. No point in that really. I mean if I had a PVR of some kind then I could what? Spend several hours every day when i wak

I dislike being awake for 4-5 hours before work, it makes the end of the work shift really drag. I really need my free time to come after work and before bedtime, rather than after bedtime and before work.

I worked that shift for three years from 2000-2002. Swing shift was, by far, my most hated shift. Unfortunately, in that particular job, swing shift was the busiest (therefore, least boring) shift, so that's what I worked. As far as hours, though, that shift sucked big time because it meant I didn't get to spend a lot of time with my family, except on weekends.

I have tried, but never could adjust to swing shifts... my biological clock wants me comatose between 9PM and midnight. I can easily work night shift as long as I get a few hours sleep just before going to work.

Back when I was younger and worked a night shift (4pm to midnight) the sex was great. Senior management couldn't be bothered to hang around and our shift turned into a big orgy*.

There's a valid argument about getting adequate sunlight. But that can be done on the 4-12pm shift. Just hit the sack when you get home. Wake up a bit later then the masses. You've got the day to yourself after the 9 to 5 shift folks have gone to the office. The stores, coffee shops and gym are uncrowded.

*If your staff isn't that hot, you've got the day off. With all the housewives. Studies have shown that the best time for sex is mid-afternoon. Forget stories about orgies late into the night. People who get it on late in the evening do so because of kids or crappy work schedules.

I worked 10pm-6am and it was a shitter. In the summer it was impossible to sleep when I got home, so there was only one thing for it: Wake the missus and make her bake me a cake... I mean wake her and do the nasty.

Come on, Slashdotters. I thought you cared about science. This "study" is awful.

1) Experimental controls. According to the article, lots of shift workers think their work impacts their lives, and are worried about their weight and their sex lives. Guess what? EVERYBODY hates their work, and is worried about their weight and their sex lives. How about asking people who *aren't* shift workers, and seeing if shift workers have bigger problems than the average Joe?

2) Conflict of interest. The summary says the study is by "Men's Health Network", but the linked article says it's by "Men's Health Network and Cephalon". Who's this "Cephalon"? Oh, they're a drug company. [cephalon.com] What sort of drugs do they make? take a wild freakin' guess. [nuvigil.com]

So, congrats on sucking down free advertising from a drug company trying to turn your life into a treatable medical condition, without a single moment of skepticism.

While the survey shows infers that shift workers may be overweight, the issue extends far beyond this group, and into the general population of the United States, including children. Childhood obesity is at all all time high in America and that has nothing to do with the night shift.

So is this a problem particular to night shift workers, or is it a general problem of our society? The article says both. What a terrible article and study.

Yes, but doing a double blind, randomized and sufficiently lengthy study with a statistically significant population would actually cost money and while some of us here on Slashdot might be interested in learning exactly why late night IT workers are overweight, undersexed and tired all of the time; I doubt that anyone else wants to spend a few million to find out. On the other hand, the government has wasted far more than a few millions on even more dubious projects, so if they're going to waste my tax mon

...an absolute shitload of money to get me to do shift work. Hell, I refuse to even do on-call anymore.

A few years ago, $BIGCORP tried to get my team to do shift work for an indeterminate period. They wouldn't tell us how long it was for, and also wouldn't tell us what sort of overtime pay we'd get for it. They even had the gall to say they would be "disappointed" if no-one took them up on the offer. Funnily enough, no-one did.

It's the night shift in Master Control at a major national Cable TV Network. One guy has been there since pre-launch days, let's call him "Joe." Now, Joe is enormous, pushing if not over 300 lbs, sports a perpetual four-day stubble, is known for -- among many other eccentricities -- coming to work in his pajamas. Not that he was a slacker, oh no. Joe is a rock, a superman, the exact guy you want on duty should there be a crisis, or even if there isn

that making banks of machinery and automation systems play nice together was easy compared to any comparable accomplishment involving people.

Not necessarily harder just very different and requiring the application of different skills. You could give the same anecdote in a manufacturing or military setting but people would be less likely to draw the wrong conclusion as you did above.

It should be obvious - the newbie in an unfamiliar environment is not going to shine. If you expect them to shine instantly

Interesting sig and it appears I've attracted another complete boofhead that's got lost on the way to the porn. Is trolling this place the online version of going out and beating up on homeless or gays?

I let myself take an 11PM-7AM shift several years ago precisely because I considered myself a night owl. I was waking up in the afternoon anyway, I figured it wasn't really a big deal. Turned out, it was. Working nights pretty thoroughly sucks away your life-force, as nearly anyone who's done one can tell you.

I have. If I had my way I'd work nothing but nights. Unfortunately there's other considerations to be made like making sure you still see the kids and making sure you don't become "invisible" to your employer/manager. Someone in another comment described it as having your "mind work(ing) clearly as if it's unwrapped from a fog" which is a pretty accurate description, for me the fog lifts at around 23:00. I guess I'm a freak but there are people like us out there.

I don't think it makes you a freak - I think it's part of natural human variation. And in a natural setting it's a valuable variation, too. It's extremely useful to always have one or two of the tribe awake and alert during the night in case nocturnal predators come calling. I would actually be very surprised if there wasn't a significant fraction of humanity that exhibited nighttime wakefulness.

I'm nearly the same; my brain kicks in around 8pm. In college, I stayed up all night/morning studying and skipped classes because I couldn't focus during the day (fortunately I was a CS major at a school that put recordings of all classes online, so this was acceptable option for me). After college, I started a job where I worked night shifts about 30% of the time. For a while, it was fine because I was traveling anyway so whether I was away from home and working nights or days didn't really matter - I w

That entire article sounds pretty familiar to me. "People with DSPS can be called extreme night owls. They feel most alert and say they function best and are most creative in the evening and at night. DSPS patients cannot simply force themselves to sleep early. They may toss and turn for hours in bed, and sometimes not sleep at all, before reporting to work or school." Pretty much sums it up.

Thanks for sharing the link. I can relate with everything written within. It explains a lot. Thankfully, once I left school, I was free to set my own schedule so its impact on my life since has been fairly minor.

I always associated it with people and the turbulence they create during the day (noise, movement, general activity,....) which falls away and takes less information to process (I'm someone sensitive who absorbs alot of information and details while constantly processing it until it becomes overwhelming and I "shurt off")

I have worked night shifts and I really, really miss the times. It was way more adjusted to my sleep cycle than a job that starts before noon. Or, in other words, it's no problem to have me at 8am still at work. The trouble is to have me there at 8am already.

it's currently 5:40am for me. And I'm still up. Not already. I easily adjust back to my sleeping habits from when I was a "night shift worker". Takes about a day. Returning to a day work cycle usually takes a lot of caffeine and almost a week 'til I'm m

Well, yes and no. I worked nights for a couple of years about five years ago. I *was* more tired on the night shift that I was when I was on a day shift, but I'd say it had more to do with the fact that I was getting five or six hours sleep than the fact that I was working nights. I'm pretty tired when I get only five or six hours sleep now that I'm back on a day shift, too.

FWIW, I kinda liked working nights -- nights were quiet, the phone didn't ring (much) at work, I'd get a couple of hours to mysel

Tell me about it... try me shift... Saturday and Sunday I work 8am-8pm

Mon/Tue/Wed I work 12midnight-9am.....

So I go straight from regular days on sunday right into a night shift... so I have the choice of either staying up ALL night sunday after working a 12 hour shift, so I can sleep during the day monday (So I can be rested for work)... or I just pass out (what happens all of the time) from exhaustion sunday night, wake up around noon monday and end up staying awake until it's time for work at midnight...

I worked night shift, 00:00-08:30, and I agree, it seems okay at first, especially if you are a bachelor. But sleeping during the day sucks, especially during the summer. People you know can't seem to understand that your sleeping hours are different and are always waking you up.

How many people can keep up a good schedule of anything when their sleep schedule is topsy-turvy?

"Crunch time" - it used to be exceptional. It's now not just acceptable; it's become the norm. This is because increasingly, clueless management simply can't manage resources properly, and substitutes crazy hours to make up for it because we let them. Your body needs 2 weeks to a month to fully recover from a single 24-hour shift of high-stress in-the-zone concentration. It's not worth it.

"But it's the only way we can compete!" No, it's the only way YOU can compete. If you can't get the work without abusing your employees, YOU have the problem. I quit.

We all have the point where we've had our fill of it. It wasn't this bad prior to the Internet, so take your "Internet Time" and shove it. YOU need it - I'd rather be broke than further ruin my health to make up for managements' inability to do their jobs properly.

I'm happier and a lot less stressed since I "took the pledge" and decided to never again take a job writing code. There are things worse than not making enough money. Working in I.T. has become one of them.

I used to be a Database admin for Interpoint, in Redmond. Before that, I worked in porn for IEG in Seattle - code monkey work.

I now work for the Air Force at McChord Field, I make slightly less but I'm 7 to 4, Mon - Fri, I can go to the gym 3 hours a week *ON THE CLOCK* in addition to my one hour lunch, and I'm a member of a union.

I've never looked back except to wonder how people put up with the bullshit they do.

Too much I.T. is like a bad marriage. It's always "I'm sorry, it was this one time - it won't happen again" - until it does. The crunch time, the extra hours, often unpaid and always unappreciated, it's the typical abusive situation. The only solution is to walk away, because management will not change. They can't afford to, because it would mean they are no longer "competitive", and so *they* would be out of a job.

But if a company can only survive by treating its employees like battered wives, they d

Come over to Europe. We need good coders and we treat them well. Our programmers arrive somewhere between 8 and 10am and go between 3 and 5pm. Mo-Fr. Occasionally (read: about twice a year) they might be asked whether it would be possible that someone could come in a Saturday for a launch so we can make sure everything's running smoothly. You get 1.5 hours of time off for every hour invested in such Saturday.

I concur. I work in the Financial sector as a web developer in the UK. 35 hours a week Mon-Fri is all I work. Maybe the very occasional weekend on release weekends (every two months) 35 hours is pretty much the norm in our financial industires in my experiance.

This last experience was the limit - I simply cannot face the thought of writing code as a 9 to whatever job. And everyone I know is at that point - it's pretty bad when a minimum wage job where you just do your work and go home at night and your time is your own looks appealing.

I've had co-workers quit because even delivering pizza sounded better, others that were suicidal because they were treated with contempt every day (management would wait until I had left for the day, then they'd gang up on him -

Come over to Europe. We need good coders and we treat them well. Our programmers arrive somewhere between 8 and 10am and go between 3 and 5pm. Mo-Fr. Occasionally (read: about twice a year) they might be asked whether it would be possible that someone could come in a Saturday for a launch so we can make sure everything's running smoothly. You get 1.5 hours of time off for every hour invested in such Saturday.

The work permit should be trivial if you're good.

This is actually something I'm working on. I'm a dual citizen (US/UK) and getting my UK passport soon just so I can more easily do this. I just need to work out if I want it to be more of a permanent move. Things like this along with the better health care systems over there are very enticing.

His action was a form of passive-aggressive behavior. Give him a taste of his own medicine.

Don't go. If it's a scheduled outage, it's not an emergency. You're at a party and someone kept filling your glass when you weren't looking and now they've taken your keys away because friends don't let friends drive drunk.

And next time he schedules an outage, he should actually schedule it, and not just throw it at the wall and hope it sticks. Even restaurant owners know how to schedule people better than th

Let me explain this little thing I learned from working a couple of years in Portugal (neverending crunch time), then Holland (8h a day and your manager tells you to go home if you're still in at 5:30 pm) and then England (overwork as norm).

Your total daily productivity working on a norm of 8h/day is significantly better than working on a norm of 10h/day - to put it simply, if you pace yourself and work fewer hours you deliver more.

This is because:- Working more than 8h/day causes chronical tiredness- Chronically tired people in intellectual professions make many more mistakes (that also includes managers, who will take the wrong decisions).- The cost of fixing those mistakes far outweights the gains of working those extra hours.

To put things in software development terms:- If you constantly work longer hours you're constantly tired. If you're constantly tired you make more bugs. Bug fixing consumes a lot more time than doing things right the first time around (often by a factor or 1000x if the bug ends up in Production), so the increase in bugs means a HUGE increase in time spent in bug-fixing. More time wasted in bug fixing means that the project starts to run late, which means clueless managers demanding even more overwork. In other words, a feed-back loop.

So how did I solved it:- Well, in England if somebody tries to get me to overwork is say "No" (I will, however, do a little extra in the last couple of days before a release if needed).

Surprisingly (or maybe not if you read what I wrote above), by working just 8h/day I still manage to deliver more than any of my colleagues that overwork. At the end of the day, in the vast majority of places results are what counts, so managers still keep me around (and I'm a freelancer, so easy to get rid of) and I have almost universally good feedback from all managers I worked with.

Unfortunately, here there are so many freelancers who are willing to work for less than the minimum wage because they are that desperate. They figure "it will help build up their portfolio". They're lying to themselves, but this is what happens when you have to compete with jobless workers in work programs who the government will literally let businesses hire for free - and kick back 100% of the salary of the people managing them to boot.

We're only "nobodies" if we let ourselves be treated that way. The comparison to Chinese labor conditions is a false dichotomy, and the sort of cowardly thinking that management drones use.

Are you that beaten down that you have to say to yourself "at least it's not as bad as in China" to justify working conditions that your parents, and most of your friends who don't work in I.T., would look at and say "Are you sick?"

So what's the purpose of work? What's the purpose of an economy....how should we, as individuals, judge its success?

Its purpose is to produce the highest welfare possible for its citizens given the resources its got. An individual's welfare is mostly about how he spends his time - money and physical stuff gives you more options, but it's not the goal. If career achievements are fulfilling for you and you have a good working environment then that's great, but making your life miserable in order to be macho i

It's worth noting that night cycles, when they are constant are not that much worse then day cycles on a body - the only issue is getting sleep if you live in area that is very noisy during the day, or you have really bad curtains/window blinds that don't darken the room.

It's also very personal, and something that can be taught even if you're naturally lacking this ability. I was strictly a day person till I hit 19 and went to the army (conscription, Finland). After I went to reserves a year later, having p

As far as yard work is concerned, while that is confined to daylight hours, at this time of the year sunrise is around5:45am and sunset is at 9:12 pm, all times when I am not at work. I prefer to mow the lawn on my day(s) off anyway. But the

I can assure you there are plenty of night shifts in all sorts of laboratories. I wish you luck in your new career, but if you're doing it to get away from night shifts, you may want to investigate something else.

This is the kind of schedule that should be banned if only by a QC manager concerned only with productivity and quality... you can't possibly be efficient when your schedule is being yanked around like that.